Posted
by
timothyon Thursday August 25, 2011 @05:46PM
from the man-v-state dept.

bs0d3 writes "As part of an emerging international trend to try to 'civilize the Internet', one of the world's worst Internet law treaties — the highly controversial Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on Cybercrime — is back on the agenda. Canada and Australia are using the Treaty to introduce new invasive, online surveillance laws, many of which go far beyond the Convention's intended levels of intrusiveness. Negotiated over a decade ago, only 31 of its 47 signatories have ratified it. Many considered the Treaty to be dormant but in recent years a number of countries have been modeling national laws based on the flawed Treaty. Leaving out constitutional safeguards, gag orders in place of oversight, and forcing service providers to retain your data may all be coming soon."

Or more likely, governments in the future will just sit back and build a profile from information shared internationally. Then use a heuristic tool to assign a point core on amount of posts, wording, and other such to assign a threat factor to someone. That threat factor gets beyond a threshold, the local police get notified, the person disappears, and either a prison camp gets another hand, or an organ bank gets another set of kidneys, heart and other items to sell to a high bidder.

You assume that the U.S. military would be used by the government to put down any significant rebellion, but I do not think this is very certain; it may seem counter-intuituve, but the U.S. military culture has a strong streak of distrust of high authority. There is a lot of thought and language devoted to classifying orders as lawful and unlawful. Some few will no doubt go along with any order, but as a whole I think it's hard to say where they would come down in the long run.